Navigation and positioning system users are demanding greater accuracy and reliability in ever more challenging environments. This is driving a wave of rapid innovation, with the result that multisensor integrated navigation systems will become much more complex. This introduces a number of problems, including how to find the necessary expertise to integrate a diverse range of technologies, how to combine technologies from different organisations that wish to protect their intellectual property, and how to incorporate new navigation technologies and methods without having to redesign the whole system. It also makes it desirable to share development effort over a range of different applications. To address this, the feasibility of a modular approach to the design and development of multisensor integrated navigation and positioning systems is analysed. Assessments of the requirements of different user communities and the adaptability of the different navigation and positioning technologies to different contexts and requirements are presented. Based on this, the adoption of an open interface standard for modular integration is recommended and the issues to be resolved in developing that standard are outlined.

In this paper, a Three Dimensional Pedestrian Movement Model (3D-MM) capable of probabilistically representing pedestrian movement in challenging indoor and outdoor localization environments is developed, implemented and evaluated. In the scope of this paper, the model is used to generate a ‘movement’ or a transition for dynamic positioning systems that are based on sequential Bayesian filtering techniques, such as particle filtering. It can also be used to assign weights for particles' movements proposed by sensors in Likelihood Particle Filters implementations. Alternatively, the developed model can be applied to other applications domains such as infrastructure design, evacuation planning, robot-human interaction and pervasive computing. The novelty of the model is in its ability to characterize both random and goals-oriented pedestrian motions and additionally use the a priori knowledge of maps and floor plans. It will be shown that an appropriate pedestrian movement model not only improves the positioning accuracy, but is also essential for a robust positioning estimator. Additionally, this work shows that maps and floor plans can improve pedestrian movement models but do not replace them, as several authors suggest.